Cooler than cool

We'd heard that it was a good year for icebergs. This one was hanging around Cape Spear, the most eastern point in North America. Plenty of people, both tourists and locals, were hanging around too, all to get a glimpse of the ice. Those chunks floating closer to shore are smaller bergs, broken off as the ice has travelled down the coast from Greenland. That iceberg on the horizon is the subject of a short video posted by CBC. It's taken by a drone, and after a few passes, it scoots through the ice arch. Pretty darn cool.

But it wasn't just Cape Spear that had visiting icebergs. They seemed to be everywhere, floating off the coasts of Newfoundland. Travelling around in my little rental car, I'd come around a bend in the road, and there below me would be a bay full of what looked like a fleet of white boats. Only they weren't boats, they were icebergs. This is the 'ice flotilla' in Hant's Harbour.

The video below (shaky, I apologize) is how one iceberg (the biggest one, the one on the right) looked just after it 'foundered'. While I didn't catch that part of the action, at least you can see how quickly the chunks of ice dispersed from the bigger berg once it broke. Pieces of ice are streaming away from the berg, rippling the water, almost as if someone had picked up the iceberg and dropped it (which is pretty much what it looked like as it happened). One of the women watching from the same vantage point said it was a very lucky thing to see -- and that this was only the second time she'd ever witnessed such an event. Lucky especially for 'from away' me.